This blog runs parallel to a new poetry blog 'Poetry Pinfold' (poetrypinfold.blogspot.com), and a new blog with poems in Dutch (bartnooteboomgedichten.blogspot.com)

Friday, April 27, 2018

368. A theory of everything

The totality of things: humans, nature, physical
objects, and ideas, folds into itself, churns and changes. It would be nice to
have a model that explains the whole. Such as in physics Boyle’s law that explains
the relation between temperature, volume and pressure of a gas in a tank,
without having to take into account the underlying chaotic collisions between
molecules with each other and the wall of the tank.

Economics offered the law of supply and demand,
where equilibrium arises from the workings of an ‘invisible hand’, without
having to go into choice behaviour of individual producers and consumers. It
offers principles of economies of scale, diminishing returns, and equilibria in
game theory. Sociology offered law-like effects of networks, such as those of
density, centrality, and strength of

ties. Psychology offers the principle of
parochial altruism, used earlier in this blog.

Is
there a wider, more encompassing model? In earlier items in this blog I
discussed ontologies. I used an ‘Object-Oriented Ontology (3O)’ with a wide
range, ‘flat’ ontology including objects such as people, plants, and parrots, sticks
and stones, but also dreams, drama, and devils. An object is characterized as
having inside elements that cohere in a more or less stable structure, and an
outside of other objects that affect the internal structure of this object, and
are affected by it, and thus change also, including the human phenomenology of
intentions, use, experience, and knowledge.

An object
then is seen as the difference between what comes in and what goes out.
Attractive here, in this perspective, is that it includes science as the
analysis of the inside as well as phenomenology on the outside, the subject of
scholarship of Man and society. They are both indispensable and part of a
whole. Each separately is reductive.

I
tried to add a general account of change in terms of a circular process. That
was originally presented as a theory of discovery[i],
but it applies more widely, including natural evolution, and it can also, I now
find, be positioned in philosophy. The more general formulation now is as
follows. In realizing their inner potential, in interaction with their
environment (E), objects (Ob) can disappear or survive, in affecting that
environment or adapting to it, by developing a new inner structure (I) with a
new potential that can be transmitted and can proliferate. The universal
principles are: more or less random or guided variation of the inside from
interaction with the outside, which in turn changes, with survival of the
object or not, and expansion or duplication of success.

The
challenge, faced but not solved by Hegel, was how in the realization of
potential new potential can be created. My answer was that in moving from one
environment to another, one encounters novel challenges of survival that
require adaptation and provide insight into opportunities for it. A novel
environment offers new variety to interact with, producing novel objects.

This
general process includes natural evolution as a special case, except that there
the novel environment is not deliberately sought but imposed, and adaptation is
random, not guided by inference. In human discovery, there is choice of novel
environments, less randomness, with some imaginative insight in potential new
directions, based on experience and learning, more co-evolution with the
environment, in market making and lobbying, artificial selection in
laboratories and trial markets, and imitation of success, with variations.

For a
general causality driving this process, I proposed Aristotelian multiple
causality, with the object being the
efficient cause, goals the final cause, outside resources the material cause,
inside potential the formal cause, environmental conditions, including
institutions, the conditional cause, and established models of conduct the
exemplary cause.

For natural
evolution, the efficient cause is cells, the final cause is the drive to life
and survival (Spinoza’s ‘conatus’), the material cause is foods, the formal
cause is instinct and DNA, the conditional cause is environmental conditions
(climate, rival creatures, availability of foods), and the exemplary cause can
be role models (as with chimpansees and bankers).

For
humans the causal factors are more complex: with a variety of final causes
(profit, entrepreneurship, independence, adventure), a variety of material
causes in the form of resources (economic capital), a variety of formal causes
in different forms (intellectual, cultural capital), conditional causes in the position
an object has in different networks (social capital), institutions (the law,
symbolic capital), climate, and geography.

An object
can be the efficient cause (a virus, a volcano, an entrepreneur), but also a
material cause (tool), formal cause (technology), conditional cause (climate,
market, institution), exemplary cause (iconic role model).

The
connection between this causality and the circle of discovery is as follows.
The efficient cause is a firm, scientist, artist, or politician, the final
cause is profit, innovation, power, adventure, the material cause is local
practices met in the novel environment, the formal cause is the ability to
cross cognitive and cultural distance, imagination, and daring, the conditional
cause is local institutions and markets, and the exemplary cause is an iconic
pioneer who succeeded.

What
connects all cases and all objects is the constitution, failure and change of
what is inside the object, in the dynamic of interaction with its outside and the
change of that change.

All
this together, I propose, covers much of nature as well as human conduct. Is it
a theory of everything? Getting there, perhaps.

A
challenge now is to see how, if at all, this may connect with the new
wonderworld of quantum physics. I have been studying interaction between people
and organizations most of my life, and now, to my delight, I find from the work
of Carlo Rovelli[ii] that at the lowest
possible level in physics, quanta manifest themselves from one discrete state
to another due to interaction with others. Interaction is everywhere. Could I
develop my theory further by looking at that? That is the subject for a later
item in this blog.

[i]Bart Nooteboom, 2000, Learning and innovation in organizations and
economies, Oxford University Press.

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